Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GCN) - 20% 2:44 - 'DJ Grenola'
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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GCN) - 20% 2:44 - 'DJ Grenola'
- Publication date
- 2005
- Topics
- Metroid Echoes, low%, GameCube
Low% "secret world assisted" speed run of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes in 33 segments, completed on February 25 2005.
Author's comments:
This is a 20% "out-of-bounds" run of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, in which I skip two "essential" items; the echo visor and the cobalt translator (and all non-essential items). In a nutshell, it was a quick and dirty experiment to see whether 20% could be made to work under speed conditions. While I wanted the run to be reasonably tight, as a courtesy to the viewer and to give some idea of what sort of times might be possible if out-of-map methods were used in speed runs, I was more interested in using the run to try out various new techniques and ideas; and I didn't want to devote months and months to it (hence saving at just about every available point), so if you are expecting another Prime 1:04 you are likely to be disappointed.
When I began the run, the lowest % was 21 (skipped echo visor). At the time, both kip and Flamancipator had announced their intentions to do hard and normal 21% runs respectively, and I was happy to leave them to it. However, shortly after this, Flamy abandoned his run to work on skipping the cobalt translator. I had already completed a 21% game with a time of around eight hours, so I decided to begin a recorded run of 21% normal. At that stage, and as inspection of the early segments will tell you, I wasn't planning to make the recording public.
A few things happened next. First, the cobalt translator was skipped, dropping the game's lowest percentage to 20%. Then the emerald translator was also culled, giving us a 19% game. The 19% game, though, requires a trick very near the start (the "101% ghetto") to prevent a translator gate from appearing, a trick which neither myself nor kip had done in our runs. At the present time, it also requires a technique known as "floating" which is very slow and therefore not compatible with speed running. Kip decided to abort his run at this stage, while he waited for the % to settle. It was at this point that I decided I would try to make my recording public, as it was beginning to look like it would be a long time before another low % run would surface. I was still intending to do 21% instead of the much more complex 20% at this stage.
When I reached Hydrodynamo, I suddenly realised in pure horror that I had completely forgotten about a very important time saver (the fast route to Jump Guardian) near the start of the game which has been performed in all recorded runs so far. Quite how I managed to forget a break which saves a whole minute is something I will probably never understand, but forget it I did. After chewing on my fist for twenty minutes, I aborted the run in disgust, and it lay dormant on a memory card and my hard drive for two weeks. Eventually, an encouraging post on the m2k2 forums from kip made me consider picking it up again, but I decided that after a precious minute had been thrown away I was going to shoot for the much harder 20%, instead of 21%, by way of punishing myself.
Despite the above idiotic mistake, which still haunts me in my dreams, there are a number of tricks in this run which so far have not seen the light of day in a recorded game; fast Path of Eyes, skip of upper Torvus, Ing Hive temple key skip, the LOL jump in Feeding Pit, Undertemple Shaft scandash, screw without spider, as well as the secret world-assisted cobalt and echo visor skips. Segments 22 and 25 form the bulk of the cobalt skip and contain two wallcrawls each; both of these took hundreds of attempts to get good enough. The wallcrawling in segment 22 is probably about as good as it can be done, but a lacklustre spider guardian fight and a mistake crossing the room spoil it. Segment 25 contains numerous mistakes and pieces of bad luck, but screw attack secret worlds are hard to get right under speed conditions, so both these segments ended up in the run; I simply ran out of patience. The very short segment 26 shows the simpler echo visor skip wallcrawl, which wasn't quite perfect either. If secret worlds give you anaphlaxis, these are the segments to avoid.
One other thing I chose to try was to change the order of item collection in Torvus. Radix's 2:11 collects gravity boost, grapple beam, boost ball, and then seekers. I decided to try collecting the boost ball first as Retro wanted us to, because I had a theory that the time lost backtracking to Forgotten Bridge to use the portal might be compensated for by the fact that earlier boost ball makes everything faster. I do not think this was a successful tactic, mainly due to the agonisingly long wait for rooms to load in lower Torvus, but there is at least now some watchable evidence of this, so runners can make their own judgements in future attempts.
The run is littered with mistakes, and I clearly used far too many saves, at least three of which were in really silly places. I am not kip, Radix, Sparky, Trebor, or pirate109; I am not going to pretend to be. While I'm actually quite pleased with the final time (round about the two hour mark Sparky and I decided that three hours might be a good target), it is obvious that much better could be achieved. I am confident that ten minutes can be knocked off the final time easily. If anyone else tries a fast 20%, I think they should be shooting for 2:35 or 2:30, and adding tricks like the MaM in Hall of Combat Mastery, skip Alpha Blogg, Vault no darkworld, and of course the fast Jump Guardian route. I am proud of parts of the run, but fairly embarrassed by the run as a whole. The early segments were awful; given the effort it took to get some of the later segments right, watching them makes me cringe. The run does not really find its feet until it reaches Torvus. Many of the boss fights are non-optimal, and I made a couple of poor route choices. If I ever do another run, I will try a lot harder.
Finally I'll just mention my position on these out-of-bounds techniques or "secret worlds" as they are popularly dubbed. It may seem strange for someone who found three in the original Prime and did the groundwork for another useful one in Echoes, but I am not their biggest fan. I dislike the effect they have on the way the game looks, I hate secret world solutions that require "floating", and I find the process of wallcrawling around outside the map very difficult and tedious (those who think that it somehow "makes the game easier" are just wrong). However, given Retro's clampdown on sequence breaking in Echoes, there is not much alternative for players wishing to extend the replayability of the game. Despite the continuing controversy over the use of out-of-map traversal, I hope this run will provide something a little bit different for players to watch, be they secret world zealots, secret world haters, or secret world neutrals; hopefully it will also lay the foundations for a more focused 20 or 19 per cent effort. Nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing my time soundly thrashed. If anyone else would like to do a proper 20%, and has any queries about anything, I'll try my best to answer them.
I'd just like to thank Sparky, Kip and Flamancipator for their help and encouragement, Nate and Mills for providing a community to work within, and Radix, without whose famous Prime 100% run I would never have skipped a single item in a Metroid Prime game. The run is dedicated to everyone who found or worked on any of the tricks I used, and those who convinced me to see it through, despite its obvious imperfections.
Author's comments:
This is a 20% "out-of-bounds" run of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, in which I skip two "essential" items; the echo visor and the cobalt translator (and all non-essential items). In a nutshell, it was a quick and dirty experiment to see whether 20% could be made to work under speed conditions. While I wanted the run to be reasonably tight, as a courtesy to the viewer and to give some idea of what sort of times might be possible if out-of-map methods were used in speed runs, I was more interested in using the run to try out various new techniques and ideas; and I didn't want to devote months and months to it (hence saving at just about every available point), so if you are expecting another Prime 1:04 you are likely to be disappointed.
When I began the run, the lowest % was 21 (skipped echo visor). At the time, both kip and Flamancipator had announced their intentions to do hard and normal 21% runs respectively, and I was happy to leave them to it. However, shortly after this, Flamy abandoned his run to work on skipping the cobalt translator. I had already completed a 21% game with a time of around eight hours, so I decided to begin a recorded run of 21% normal. At that stage, and as inspection of the early segments will tell you, I wasn't planning to make the recording public.
A few things happened next. First, the cobalt translator was skipped, dropping the game's lowest percentage to 20%. Then the emerald translator was also culled, giving us a 19% game. The 19% game, though, requires a trick very near the start (the "101% ghetto") to prevent a translator gate from appearing, a trick which neither myself nor kip had done in our runs. At the present time, it also requires a technique known as "floating" which is very slow and therefore not compatible with speed running. Kip decided to abort his run at this stage, while he waited for the % to settle. It was at this point that I decided I would try to make my recording public, as it was beginning to look like it would be a long time before another low % run would surface. I was still intending to do 21% instead of the much more complex 20% at this stage.
When I reached Hydrodynamo, I suddenly realised in pure horror that I had completely forgotten about a very important time saver (the fast route to Jump Guardian) near the start of the game which has been performed in all recorded runs so far. Quite how I managed to forget a break which saves a whole minute is something I will probably never understand, but forget it I did. After chewing on my fist for twenty minutes, I aborted the run in disgust, and it lay dormant on a memory card and my hard drive for two weeks. Eventually, an encouraging post on the m2k2 forums from kip made me consider picking it up again, but I decided that after a precious minute had been thrown away I was going to shoot for the much harder 20%, instead of 21%, by way of punishing myself.
Despite the above idiotic mistake, which still haunts me in my dreams, there are a number of tricks in this run which so far have not seen the light of day in a recorded game; fast Path of Eyes, skip of upper Torvus, Ing Hive temple key skip, the LOL jump in Feeding Pit, Undertemple Shaft scandash, screw without spider, as well as the secret world-assisted cobalt and echo visor skips. Segments 22 and 25 form the bulk of the cobalt skip and contain two wallcrawls each; both of these took hundreds of attempts to get good enough. The wallcrawling in segment 22 is probably about as good as it can be done, but a lacklustre spider guardian fight and a mistake crossing the room spoil it. Segment 25 contains numerous mistakes and pieces of bad luck, but screw attack secret worlds are hard to get right under speed conditions, so both these segments ended up in the run; I simply ran out of patience. The very short segment 26 shows the simpler echo visor skip wallcrawl, which wasn't quite perfect either. If secret worlds give you anaphlaxis, these are the segments to avoid.
One other thing I chose to try was to change the order of item collection in Torvus. Radix's 2:11 collects gravity boost, grapple beam, boost ball, and then seekers. I decided to try collecting the boost ball first as Retro wanted us to, because I had a theory that the time lost backtracking to Forgotten Bridge to use the portal might be compensated for by the fact that earlier boost ball makes everything faster. I do not think this was a successful tactic, mainly due to the agonisingly long wait for rooms to load in lower Torvus, but there is at least now some watchable evidence of this, so runners can make their own judgements in future attempts.
The run is littered with mistakes, and I clearly used far too many saves, at least three of which were in really silly places. I am not kip, Radix, Sparky, Trebor, or pirate109; I am not going to pretend to be. While I'm actually quite pleased with the final time (round about the two hour mark Sparky and I decided that three hours might be a good target), it is obvious that much better could be achieved. I am confident that ten minutes can be knocked off the final time easily. If anyone else tries a fast 20%, I think they should be shooting for 2:35 or 2:30, and adding tricks like the MaM in Hall of Combat Mastery, skip Alpha Blogg, Vault no darkworld, and of course the fast Jump Guardian route. I am proud of parts of the run, but fairly embarrassed by the run as a whole. The early segments were awful; given the effort it took to get some of the later segments right, watching them makes me cringe. The run does not really find its feet until it reaches Torvus. Many of the boss fights are non-optimal, and I made a couple of poor route choices. If I ever do another run, I will try a lot harder.
Finally I'll just mention my position on these out-of-bounds techniques or "secret worlds" as they are popularly dubbed. It may seem strange for someone who found three in the original Prime and did the groundwork for another useful one in Echoes, but I am not their biggest fan. I dislike the effect they have on the way the game looks, I hate secret world solutions that require "floating", and I find the process of wallcrawling around outside the map very difficult and tedious (those who think that it somehow "makes the game easier" are just wrong). However, given Retro's clampdown on sequence breaking in Echoes, there is not much alternative for players wishing to extend the replayability of the game. Despite the continuing controversy over the use of out-of-map traversal, I hope this run will provide something a little bit different for players to watch, be they secret world zealots, secret world haters, or secret world neutrals; hopefully it will also lay the foundations for a more focused 20 or 19 per cent effort. Nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing my time soundly thrashed. If anyone else would like to do a proper 20%, and has any queries about anything, I'll try my best to answer them.
I'd just like to thank Sparky, Kip and Flamancipator for their help and encouragement, Nate and Mills for providing a community to work within, and Radix, without whose famous Prime 100% run I would never have skipped a single item in a Metroid Prime game. The run is dedicated to everyone who found or worked on any of the tricks I used, and those who convinced me to see it through, despite its obvious imperfections.
- Addeddate
- 2005-02-26 00:46:15
- Color
- color
- Identifier
- MetroidEchoes_20p_244
- Sound
- sound
- Type
- MovingImage
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